New way to buff Elephant Conversion Resistance

Im glad we agree on this.

However, you dont seem to understand WHY they are terrible.

(Elite) War Elephants are one of the strongest units in late game teamgames. They alone can win games on michi or bf, and depending on civs and circumstances they can be viable on maps like arena too. There are several reasons for this.
First, they cost mostly food. Now food is an interesting ressource. It is very hard to get early on, but once your farms are set up, its actually the easiest ressource to produce. Setting up trade for gold heavy units like paladin takes time and is expensive; but war eles can be spammed for days once your eco is fully upgraded and you only need about 30-40 trade carts.
Second, they are absurdly population efficient. This is something that barely matters in castle age, but gets more and more important later on. 40++ elite war eles with siege behind are cost effectivly killed by halbs, but you simply cant fit enough halbs into your limited population.
Third, the longer the game is the smaller the impact of the initial investment (elite upgrade, mahouts, all the castle you need for production). Once you produced 300 eles it does not matter anymore how much your infrastructure did cost.

For all those reasons, War Eles get progressivly stronger the longer the game goes on even if we ignore the stat boost from the elite upgrade. This in turn means that to keep them balanced, they have to be weak early on - because something that is already strong in castle age and only gets stronger and stronger will at one point be OP.

how do you define “nearby”? Is it 2 tiles, 3 tiles, 5 tiles? What if there are monks nearby?

Concept sounds interesting, but I think something like this will benefit weak Battle elephant civs like Vietnamese, Bengalis in 1v1. War elephants is a tricky unit. Personally I feel, Persians should get a different unique unit altogether which is cheap but weak and War elephants should be their secondary unit that gets unlocked by their imp tech similar to Flaming Camels. This way they’ll retain their black forest TG power while becoming more usable in land 1v1.

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RNG can be frustrating and IMO doesn’t belong in AoE2 beyond what’s already there. Try to see it from the other player’s perspective. Trying to counter eles with monks only to convert much lower-value units like Xbows, and then immediately getting stomped if you don’t already have massed pikes? Sounds anti-fun to me (as does anything else that punishes the enemy for microing). You don’t have to agree with me, but hopefully you understand why some people are not a fan of this.

Well, chonkers do have a lot of cake to go around, after all. I think that’s the most promising route, but it still leaves a lot of unanswered questions, and the economic constraints would still have to be massive.

That’s why I think this:

is the best way to deal with it. Maybe eles/mahouts can get some kind of viability buff, but nothing is going to make them viable in most 1v1s without a complete overhaul. So it’s best to acknowledge that outside of closed map TGs, Persians are basically down a UU, and give them something else for 1v1s. Although I kind of think that eles could be unlocked on hitting Imp, like the Thirisidai, with either the Elite upgrade or the Mahouts tech (not both) providing the necessary stat buff when it can be afforded.

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Honestly, I think this suggestion even helps with that. A big part of why war elephants can be such a potent transition is because the massive superiority of monks allows an enemy player to avoid speccing into their larger-scale counters until it’s too late.

If anything, this would actually make them WEAKER in the lategame, since by building elephants earlier, you’d be pushing your enemy into their counters earlier on as well; you can’t build up an unstoppable wall of elephants if they’re constantly dying to pike pressure. In fact, Persians would become much more balanced overall.

I like to keep suggestions vague so they can be tested and tweaked. Ideally it would be large enough to catch most of the war party, but not so massive as to punish a player for finding a solo elephant and trying to pull off a clutch conversion. What exactly that would be would need to be fiddled with.

No more frustrating than trying any other counter against a civ resistant to them. You could just as easily say that Cataphracts are frustrating because you built pikes to counter them but they didn’t do any extra damage!

Once people get accustomed to the change, they’d be fine.

As far as RNG is concerned, we already have multiple civs that effect Monk RNG in one way or another, like the Teuton conversion resistance. I don’t think this is really a problem, and it wouldn’t bother me.

I think this new UT isnt very usefull since the only thing it does is just to counter a niche unit, to help a bad unit on castle age.
For late imp,where you see war ele more often. I would research faith at this stage of the game.

The problem is, all you really need to shut down war elephants entirely in castle age is 1-2 monks, and no matter how niche, almost everyone has at least that many just for relics.

It’d be a pretty cheap tech though, no doubt about that.

Orthodoxy was also a very cheap UT among all the UT of the game and yet it was rarely researched. If you want to deal with just 1-2 monks LC line is enough.

And as said before.

Even if you get the tech, elephant will remain useless on castle age.

Orthodoxy wasn’t just cheap, it also did virtually nothing. Monks have so little HP that 3 extra armor didn’t make much of a difference. A better example would be Ironclad, especially for Rams. In the right circumstances, extremely useful, reducing villager damage from 6 to 2.

In Castle age, the investment is relatively minimal. No elite upgrade needed, even going without armor techs isn’t terribly important because their default stats are so strong. Throw in 1-5 elephants and you’ve improved your composition and/or forced your enemy to swap into something they weren’t using before, costing them more than it cost you!

I will reiterate though, this is not supposed to be used every single game. It’s just to make them feasible in some circumstances, not all.

i took orthodoxy as an exemple since your new UT is related to monk.

One castle and 1-5 elephants arent a small investment and since elephant cant catch up xbow nor knight you will use a double compo units first.

knowing persian boring gameplay they need something unique and usable.

Sure, but conversion resistance is a lot different from monk hp/etc. Not very comparable. First Crusade is 900 resources for example, and is a really nice bonus even without the free serjeants.

That’s the whole idea tbh. If all you are training is elephants, then the tech would do absolutely nothing, because it would just randomly select another elephant. The main effect would be if you have elephants mixed in with multiple other units.

I find war elephants to be fun and cool and powerful, especially in smaller numbers. They’re just too hard countered by monks to be useful. Which is what this idea is designed to fix.

Obviously you need the scout line to kill monks and/or your own monks to convert your units back and heal them. And of course you’re not supposed to only make a few units and expect your opponent to just sit there and not make any counter units.

If that worked, people would do that.

But they don’t, so clearly more is needed.

neat idea, not sure if it can be done with the engine.

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Two monks convert one elephant should be better.

It confirm what i said before. You’ll need to do a double compo units before your opponent does even with that tech and since war elephant cost is very huge, he gets it before you do.
Beside if your ennemy go xbow. He can just out micro elephant first before getting hit by your own xbow.

Elephants are not supposed to be sent into battle one by one. You need a decent number of them to do real damage. Making them resistant to monks will make them way too OP, especially if your civ’s pike/halb line has weak upgrades. Also see below from other topic:

Since you’ll likely have a castle at some point anyway, and since the elephants high base stats mean they don’t really need any upgrades to function in a pure combat role, there is no significant upfront cost.

The mere presence of the tech would allow for many strategies that are currently impractical. Right now if you invest in an early elephant, you are basically accepting that it will get converted. With this tech, you don’t need to research it immediately, you just need to research it before the enemy gets a successful conversion, which can give you several successful battles.

As far as xbows are concerned, the goal is not to make this something you would do in every case, just one that is viable in some cases.

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This tech would not be useful with a solitary elephant, since the monks would only have one unit to randomly select, and the elephant would get converted anyway
 It would primarily be useful with a few elephants mixed into a larger force of other, cheaper units.